There are 1.3 billion people on the web and over 100 million active websites. The Internet's universe of information and people, both published and addressed to the user is growing every day. Published content includes web pages, news sources, RSS feeds, social networking profiles, blog postings, job sites, classified ads, and other user generated content like reviews. Email (both legitimate and spam), text messages, newspapers, subscriptions, etc. are addressed directly to the user. The growth of Internet users and competition among publishers is leading to a backlog or heap of hundreds or thousands of unread email, rss, and web content in user inboxes/readers—forcing users to settle somewhere between the extremes of either reading the all the items or starting fresh (as in “email bankruptcy”).
Accordingly the inventors of the current patent application believe that use of a search engine (such as BING available from Microsoft Corporation or GOOGLE available from Google Inc) is not enough, because its use is like using a fishing line, useful for finding what you want right now. The current inventors have made an invention (described in the next paragraph) that can be used more like a fishing net, to help you capture content tailored to your interests, and for which it is either painful or inefficient to repeatedly use a conventional search engine. Google Inc. offers a service called Google Alerts which are email messages of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on the user's choice of a query or topic. Conventional uses of Google Alerts include monitoring a developing news story, keeping current on a competitor or industry, getting the latest on a celebrity or event, keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams. However, Google Alerts requires the user to enter one or more “search terms” in order to initiate the service. Hence, relevance of documents identified by Google Alerts depends on the search term selected by the user. The current inventors believe that it is not easy for users to manually generate appropriate search terms, without using the invention as discussed below.